Historically, hard drives have had a sector size of 512 bytes. This changed when drives became large enough for such a small sector size to make the overhead of keeping track of these sectors consume too much storage space, making hard drives more expensive to produce than strictly necessary. Many modern drives are tagged as “advanced format” drives; Right now, this means they have a sector size of 4096 bytes (4KiB). This includes most if not all SSDs, and most 2TB+ magnetic drives.

If you create a partition on such a drive without ensuring the partition begins on a physical sector, the device firmware will have to do some “magic” which takes more time than not doing the magic in the first place, resulting in reduced performance. It is therefore important to make sure you align partitions correctly on these devices. I generally align partitions to the 1MiB mark for the sake of being future proof. Even though my current drives have 512B and 4KiB sector sizes, I don’t want to encounter any problems when larger sector sizes are introduced.

Although ZFS can use entire devices without partitioning, I use GPT to partition and label my drives. My labels are generally reference to physical location in the server. For example, Bay1.2 would mean the drive is located in bay one slot two. This makes it so much easier to figure out which drive to replace when the need arise.

Continue reading →